I moved my citrus inside the garage in a miniature winterstorage. Outside the temp was already freezing at night. I knew that was gonna shck the plants but I hoped they would be stable after a while. But now leaves still keep dropping making my latifolia bald. My sinenis lost a lot of leaves he made this summer, the mitis also droppped some but he seems stable and the limon actually did the best :s. He lost 4 or 5 leaves but still looks good.

I do not water them until they are dry enough so overwatering is not the problem. I was wondering how long this instability is going to last?

mine stopped , no more leaves to fall , except few on the top....stand-by situation until spring

Mine are really dropping a lot. The weird part is that the Limon is kinda stable and that is supposed to be the 'sensitive' one. :s

The latifolia is gonna enter spring very bald, e.a. totally bald.

I'm a bit bummed by the sinesis. He got nice new foliage after last winter when he became 100% leafless. And now the last week or so he dropped leaves also.
I must say the environmental change was huge. Outside temps were going below zero at night , also in the greenhouse(which my latifolia showed me with frostdamage on the new young leaves) and I've put them in the garage at a temp reaching 10°C. At first they seemed to hang on for the first weeks but then it started happening. I thought it would take at most a couple of days before the leafdrop would start but it lasted longer.
That's why I'm surprised. Can anyone relate to my situation?

Sven,

I hope may be this little explanation below will help you in the future.
At the beginning of growing citrus I have killed myself already ‘few’ citrus trees! Growing trees in container is not the best choice.
As Ivica says in one of his post, we are the worst pests and that’s true!
Winter is the hardest time for us to keep them alive until spring with minimal costs but with few small tricks everything can be kept with no trouble.
My technique is working for me but I’m not sure if you could give the same conditions to your trees. I’m not an expert but due to my job I always trying to find the root cause of failure!

Temperature: I keep them at 5 C degrees (never below). I take care about the temps in the room to not exceed 10C degrees. Why? Here is why:
1. The twigs activity starts above 8C degrees.
2. The leaf activity starts above 9C degrees.
3. The root activity starts above 12C degrees.
You can see there are some differences in temps. So, because there is no root activity I try to stop the leaf activity also by cooling the foliage during sunny days. It’s simple; I’m just opening the door until the temperature drops down.

Light: The highest light requirements have the oranges and then are followed by mandarins and then the lemons. Close to the window I’m placing the oranges and mandarins and the lemons are coming after.

Humidity: is always above 50%, best 80%. This is good when the temps suddenly jump above 10C for leaf activity.

Water: I ‘almost’ keep the root ball dry because keeping them ‘dormant’ watering the root ball could kill the roots due to lack of oxygen, this is also causing massive leaf drop. During winter you can kill more citrus tree due to overwatering then underwatering.

Apologize for my poor English.

My kids already ate all fruits even lemons!
Here are few photos done today, cold but sunny:

Thanks for the advice!
It seems they have stabelized and the outside temp is about 10°C so the winterstorage is probably the same.

I think I'm gonna go for heatcables next year, that looks more promising then what I've got going now